Yoyotech AMD Primate review

Built to a price point, not an ideal spec. Does that really matter?

Performance-wise, the Primate is as much of a penny-pinching washout as we expected

Our Verdict

You know what you're getting here; perfectly functional computing with no frills whatsoever

For

Incredibly cheap

Faster than an Atom. Just…

Against

Noiser and larger than an Atom

Little upgrade potential

A PC rocking in at £100 isn't, in all likelihood, going to be very good.

You'd better have half an idea what you're doing when faced with the AMD Primate.

There's no OS on board, one of the concessions that's had to be made to keep the price low, but it's a perfect vessel for that XP product key that's been going spare since you installed Vista.

We also found a bit of (presumably unintentional) feature-hiding on our model – an initial look at the backplate seemed at ﬁrst to indicate a complete lack of Ethernet, which was only made free once we'd bent back the cheeky bit of metal covering the port.

Budget spec

Weren't expecting much? You won't be disappointed, then. As a machine for connecting to and browsing the Internet, the Primate is absolutely spot on.

The 2.1GHz Sempron at its core – a CPU which doesn't even break the £20 barrier -- does more than enough to justify its existence, albeit while running a little warm beneath the noisy standard AMD cooler.

As a machine for doing anything else, though, it's as much of a penny-pinching washout as we expected.

The on board GeForce 6100 graphics are sluggish and old, and there's no extra peripheral clutter included (so you'll need to resurrect an old keyboard and mouse), but at least the piano black shiny-ﬁnished case disguises the ass-backwards hardware hiding within.

A few months back we specced and built a DX10-capable rig for under £200.

Disappointing package

If you're in the market for a computer that you just might want to use for more than a little light web browsing -- yet only have half of that knocking around in the bank -- we still reckon that you're better off avoiding this.

Save up a little. Live a little. Make that otherwise dumb internet terminal into a proper video-playing, game-dominating rig of perfection.

This is a respectable machine for £100, don't get us wrong – but £100 really isn't the right place to set the PC pricing benchmark.

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